Monday, December 31, 2012

Everything is Dolphins: RPGs I Like

DAYS OF THE DOLPHIN
Every rpg is, to some extent, a labor of love. With some big ticket and highly
polished products that can be hard. The slick production values conceal the
energy and enthusiasm of the goofballs who actually spend their time developing
structures for make-believe stories that other people get to play out. On the
other hand, sometimes a game wears its crazed goober enthusiasm on its sleeve.
For me, this has been the year of the performance-art level tonedeaf trolling
heartbreaker game, Vampire: Undeath. Watching that creator fail around
about his originality and how only fools would draw a connection between it and
any World of Darkness. It’s the equivalent of my creating a fantasy game
with Materia, Black Mages, Limit Breaks, Summons, and massive swords and
claiming that it bears no resemblance to Final Fantasy. Every game like
this is the product of effort- of someone who put together something they cared
about. You can hope that energy gets channeled into something interesting and
original someday. And some people embrace the goofiness of their game, how it
borrows, and how crazed it is.

Which brings us to Everything is Dolphins.

Where you play a Dolphin. Sometimes with guns.

In a year where we’ve talked about the massive Kickstarter success of products
like Hillfolk and FATE Core, we also have to recognize Everything
is Dolphins. The combination RPG/Artbook had a simple gola of $1000, and
managed to end up with $4,480. I think the Kickstarter pitch sums it up best:

“Everything is Dolphins is a role playing game hovering
somewhere between side scroller video game, talking animal fairy tale, and
triptastic fun. It's a pen and paper RPG that you play at a table, not a
computer RPG - don't be confused. It's also an art book with work by a
selection of high and low and elsewhere artists.”

It is a crazed book that doesn’t really take into account
developments in rpgs yet is probably playable. It is also a reflection on place
of games and make believe in our childhood. It also pretty clearly could also
be called the Ecco
the Dolphin RPG rpg (as written by kids).PRESENTATIONEverything is Dolphins is an 80-page perfect-bound book with full-color
glossy interiors. The layout is perfunctory- deliberately Spartan, scattered,
and fragmented. A text page will often have only a single paragraph of text on
it. In other products, I’d write that off as amateurish, but here’s it serves a
purpose. Everything is Dolphins offers a kind of rpg art/archival project. The
project curator, Tim Hutchings, wants to showcase gaming ephemera- projects
scribbled in notebooks that might otherwise have been simply thrown away or
lost in a move. So this comes from the sketches and original concepts of author
Ray Weiss. If you’ve been a gamer for any length of time you undoubtedly have
these kinds of pieces and documents laying around. So the actual text design
and presentation reflects this. There’s little in the way of explanatory text-
it assumes you know games and provides the basic rules. There’s a universality
to these kinds of hacked games- and read in that spirit, it becomes fun.On the other hand, to complement the written material, the authors have
commissioned a number of artists with varying approaches and medium. None of
this is classic rpg art material- so it is pretty avant-garde. Dolphins in
bowler hats, rainbow scraps, etched black-and-white seascapes, leather-clad
porpoises with shivs. Surreal might be a good way to put this- a different form
of surrealism from Itras By, but blowing up meaning all the same. It you like goofiness and
discordant wonder, you’ll dig this. LITERAL SOURCEBOOKI usually approach my reviews in order of material, but here I have to start at
the end. The last 36 pages of Everything is Dolphins reproduce Ray
Weiss' original notebook. Pencil sketched details, wild ramblings, pictures of
dolphins, ideas for how you might map an rpg as a side-scroller. They’re
smudged, the text goes around holes in the paper, and- of course- they’re
written on graph paper.I have magazine boxes of gaming material on my shelves. I went through a few
years ago and organized everything. Some bits and pieces from high school
exist, but most everything else from before that is gone. Our group wrote a
couple of tournament modules for our local gaming conventions in the mid1980s- The
Death Frolics. I have one or two pages from them, and one page of the
pre-made characters. Which is to say, if you’re given to reminiscing on gaming nostalgia, you’ll
enjoy this section. It made me laugh. The actual character sheets from play
just as funny, hand-made scraps and sketches, complete with maps and notes. THE RULES THEMSELVESEverything is Dolphins is, strangely enough, a post-apocalypse game.
Humanity has fallen and now the dolphins rule a watery-world pepper with the
ruins and relics of our civilization. These are not ordinary dolphins, not an
ordinary world- a Gamma World-tinged flippered rpg. Players roll 1d8 for
each of six attributes, with a 1 becoming a 2. Tests are made by rolling under
the appropriate attribute. Secondary attributes are based directly on these
results (with Constitution used the most). Players choose between one of three
dolphin races:

Bottlenose: begins with an extra feat

Atlantic Spotted: starts with an artifact

False Killer Whale: gains an extra success in combat

PCs have levels which increase as they gain experience. All start with one feat
at level one and gain another every other level. The feat list of 48 items is
broken into three tiers; some feats on higher tiers require owning one from a
lower level. Every third pick resets the choices back to tier one. Picks
include Improved Charge, Extra Breath, Bubble Shot, ocean Ally and so on.
Character creation, complete with an example takes up the first 28 pages of the
rules.

Combat and conflicts work via a dice pool. Each side rolls a number of dice
equal to a pool value- Ranged Attack, Melee Attack or Defense. Each roll of 6+
is a success; the side with the higher # of successes wins. That’s a weird
switch from the attribute test rules- flipping from needing low to needing
high. There’s a weird gap here in the attribute contested rules. It gives an
example of a Dex vs. Dex contest but doesn’t explain how that actually works- a
pool based on value or instead using the standard resolution mechanic. The
loser of a combat contest takes the difference in damage. There are also rules
for breath and a couple of other concepts, but these are incredibly minimal.
Artifacts, experience, and so only are barely sketched. A few example monsters
and adversaries are presented. Any GM wanting to run this will have to do some
serious filling in of the gaps.

Instead Everything is Dolphins offers a piece of crystalized gaming
nostalgia. Like the classic video-game it tries to emulated, EiD plays really
old-school: the crappy made-up concept game that you played with your friends.
You would have come up with more details and crunch, but you didn’t have enough
time so you ran with what you had- filling in gaps as you played. For me that
was a riff on Zelanzy’s Amber done in a post-Apocalypse America. Or the
Pulp version of GURPS I tried to pull together in 1986. Or the G.I.
Joe reskin of Danger
International I did. It is a fun book, gentle and amusing, enhanced by
crazy and amusing artwork. It is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is mine.